LAWRENCE HAD JUST arrived, bearing news of the victory of Aqaba. He was still in his Arab garb when Allenby sent for him. He flip-flopped into the general’s office, unsure of what to expect after just hearing the news that Murray had been sent down. He recalled: “It was a comic interview, for Allenby was physically large and confident, and morally so great that the comprehension of our littleness came slow to him. He sat in his chair looking at me—not straight, as his custom was, but sideways, puzzled. He was newly from France, where for years he had been a tooth of the great machine grinding the enemy. He was full of Western ideas of gun power and weight—the worst training for our war—but, as a cavalryman, was already half persuaded to throw up the new school, in this different world of Asia, and accompany [us] along the worn road of maneuver and movement; yet he was hardly prepared for anything so odd as myself—a little bare-faced silk-skirted man offering to hobble the enemy by preaching if given stores and arms and a fund of two hundred thousand [gold] sovereigns.”
But the two men needed each other: that was the fundamental basis of their kinship, and they both recognized it immediately. “Allenby could not make out how much [of me] was genuine performer and how much charlatan.… He did not ask many questions, nor talk much, but studied the map and listened to the unfolding of Eastern Syria and its inhabitants. At the end he put up his chin and said quite directly, ‘Well, I will do for you what I can,’ and that ended it. I was not sure how far I had caught him; but we learned gradually that he meant exactly what he said; and that what General Allenby could do was enough for [me] his very greediest servant.”1
Lawrence’s next stop was to visit Brigadier-General Gilbert Clayton and apprise him of the details of the Aqaba operation and the manner of its military exploitation. The first question was who would command at Aqaba. Clayton suggested Major Pierce C. Joyce. Joyce had done yeoman work building the bases at Rabegh and Wejh, a necessary skill at Aqaba.
There were a number of strategic issues that had to be discussed as well. Lawrence believed that the Yenbo-Medina sector had become a dead letter. Operations here were winding down and the center of gravity of effort was shifting north. He advised Clayton that the Rabegh and Wejh bases should be consolidated and moved to Aqaba. In this he received half a loaf from Allenby: Wejh was moved, but Rabegh would remain active in support of the Medina siege. The second issue concerned the command relationship accorded Feisal. Hitherto Feisal had been under the command of his father, King Hussein. Lawrence argued that with Aqaba now the right flank of Allenby’s army, Feisal should come under his command. The decision would have to rest with General Wingate, who was now high commissioner in Egypt. Wingate presented no difficulty, but still there was the suspicious Hussein himself.
Lawrence would speak with Hussein, but he would require the help of Colonel Wilson, who had become Hussein’s most trusted foreign adviser. After traveling to Jidda, Lawrence arranged a meeting at which the king readily agreed—for his own unknown reasons. Lawrence recalled: “In foreign politics he betrayed a mind as narrow as it had been broad in unworldly things; with much of that destructive tendency of little men to deny the honesty of opponents. I grasped something of the fixed jealousy which made the modern Feisal suspect in his father’s court; and realized how easily mischief-makers could corrode the King.” While they were thus engaged, telegrams arrived stating that trouble was brewing among the Howeitat and somehow Auda seemed to be the instigator. By taking passage aboard the HMS Hardinge, Lawrence returned to Aqaba by the third afternoon.
Lawrence found Auda, Zaal, and Mohammed el Dheilan in a tent at Guweira. By the time he arrived, Lawrence had determined the mischief Auda and Mohammed had been up to. Both were upset by the British failure immediately to recognize the great victory at Aqaba and, like Moses’s children, had sought comfort in a lesser god. Mohammed had made overtures to the Turkish governor at Maan. The Turks were willing to offer certain emoluments for his services. At the agreed-upon time, he went to Maan to receive his gifts. Meanwhile, Auda had learned of the double-dealing and had ambushed Mohammed, robbing him “to his skin.” At first Lawrence feigned ignorance of the double-dealing; then, in the quiet manner of Arab diplomacy, he made Auda coldly aware that he knew of his transgressions.
Lawrence then explained the new strategic situation, pointing out that now Feisal’s entire army would be coming north to join them, with camels heavily burdened with the king’s appreciation for their great triumph. Lawrence then offered the two a monetary advance for their continued trust and loyalty. By Auda’s reckoning, it was more profitable to work the alliance than sell his services cheaply to the Turks, for the Turks would always be there to be fleeced by Auda and his wolves at any time.
Afterward Lawrence contacted Cairo, saying the treachery was a mere misunderstanding. This seemed to satisfy GHQ and the matter was ended, though it was a lesson to Lawrence, who saw the force of his leadership was still based on a slender reed of tribal greed. But no matter. Greed was a powerful source of motivation, and after all, leadership was all about motivation, whether the pecuniary kind or the patriotic kind.
LAWRENCE NOW TOOK time to address certain planning shortcomings he had had to deal with ever since his arrival to the Hejaz desert. Through him, the rational tradition of the West came into contact with the oral or narrative tradition of the Bedouin. The former was steeped in the culture of military science and strict attention to detail, the latter to a prophet’s narrative of a future unfolding in the palm of a deity’s hand. Lawrence was able to create a workable synthesis between the two cultures. Following the seizure of the port of Aqaba on July 6, 1917, he offered the following assessment: “So far our war had had but one studied operation—the march on Aqaba. Such haphazard playing with men and movements of which we had assumed the leadership, disgraced our minds. I vowed to know henceforward, before I moved, where I was going and by what roads.” The problem was to be able to link means to ends through some reliable method of execution. The Bedouin, so poor in means and unschooled in establishing elaborate goals, would have to reinvent himself: “Aims and ideas must be translated into tangibility by material expression. The desert men were too detached [rationally] to express the one; too poor in goods, too remote from complexity, to carry the other.”
For the leader and his staff, it is one thing to recognize that future expectation, in the modern sense, is a question of minimizing uncertainty through control, but it is another matter to implement a design for the future. Perhaps the one thing that distinguishes the narrative prophet from a true agent of change like Lawrence is that the prophet has no plan—only a vision. Knowledge and understanding of the substance of planning and design are what give the agent of change influence over the future. The emphasis on substance is meant to get beyond the fetish of the planning process and move toward issues of structure and content, for it is this dimension that Lawrence fundamentally brought to the desert revolt. The leader’s will becomes the prime mover—the engine—of all action and movement into the future. In the military realm, a tactical plan is thus the “crystallization” of the leader’s will in his struggle to control and dominate events moving toward the future. The motive force of the leader’s will, in its crystalline form, is cut and polished by his planning staff. The plan—sharp and diamond hard—cuts through the glaze of the present and into the future. A flawed plan, like a flawed diamond, will shatter as it cuts into the rock-hard reality of uncertainty. Branch Rickey recognized the same thing in playing and managing baseball. “Luck,” said Rickey, “is the residue of good planning.” The debris from a shattered plan can cover our expectations with a fine, abrasive dust of chance and ambiguity. The light powder of risk can so completely blanket an army that its friction grinds away its ability to function. The broken plan itself can thus compound the uncertainty and danger already inherent in war.
BY JULY 17, Lawrence was at an impasse, waiting for Joyce and Feisal to come up with the Arab army and formally occupy Aqaba. As he formalized hi
s planning methodology, Lawrence conducted an after-action review of the operation, and this much was clear: “At Wejh the Hejaz war was won: after Aqaba it was ended.”2 The movement to Aqaba and out of the Hejaz was a movement into Syria, and the entire milieu of the revolt would soon change. The Hejaz was the land of desert and the raider; in Syria, the cultivated country belonged to the peasant farmer. If the revolt was to succeed, it would have to transform itself and embrace the villagers; otherwise the struggle would lose its essential legitimacy. Syria was a complex warren of factions that had to be considered and assessed independently of the whole. The natural geography had created regional “neighborhoods” that had social and ethnic differences as diverse as any political jigsaw puzzle.
Six major towns reflected the complexity of Syria. Foremost was Jerusalem, holiest city to all believers of a single God. It had grown into a kind of squalid backwater during the Turkish occupation. It was also the most eclectic, with the citizens as “characterless as hotel servants.” It was the city that had special meaning at the moment for the British and for Lloyd George, who fancied it an ideal Christmas present for his Christian people. Beirut was the newest and most cosmopolitan town, heavily stained with French influence that was rather modulated by a Greek and American presence in the harbor and the university. Beirut was the commercial gateway into Syria and in later years would become the Paris of the Middle East for a few shining moments. The city was abuzz with radical ideas and articulate intellectuals who could express those ideas. It resembled Paris in the salon-packed days of the French Revolution. As Lawrence recognized, Beirut “was to be reckoned with.”
The four remaining cities formed a jeweled necklace of ancient Syrian cultural heritage that bedecked the Western-cultivated region of Syria: Damascus, Homs, Hama, and Aleppo, with Damascus the glittering crown jewel. Here lay the capital of the region and seat of government and Turkish military headquarters. In the secular midst stood a dynamic religious center that rivaled Mecca in importance. In religious thought and dialogue, it perhaps even exceeded Mecca. The revolt, if it was to be successful, would have to hang its banner on the beetling ramparts of that historic capital. Homs and Hama were the Manichean, yin and yang “twins” of Syrian civilization. The prosaic wool and cotton of Homs competed against the finer fabric of Haman silk. The tension was parochial and local, spurred on by the belief that the true ancestral soul of Syria was cloaked in Manichean brocade. As for Aleppo, in some sense that city stood out from all the others: it was the commercial heart of Syria and Palestine; it had the greatest social diversity and therefore the most cooperative and cosmopolitan spirit of all the urban areas in the region.
Despite all this diversity, the “master key” of the Syrians was their common language. This was what Lawrence hoped to exploit in the next campaign; this was what he had tried to explain to Allenby during their first meeting, and it seemed he grasped intuitively the military implications of a linguistic common denominator. Upon all this complexity, the Turks attempted to overlay a Potemkin veneer of political unity, all the while seeking to exploit the many petty jealousies among the competing groups. The idea of an Arab nation would have to be imposed, at least initially. Lawrence believed, though, that an Arab outsider, a Sunni Muslim like Feisal with outstanding religious credentials, might weld a coalition that would carry the Syrians against their Ottoman masters. The coalition, spurred on by victory, might last long enough to secure victory and the stability of peace when “everything material and moral might be pawned.”
The campaign in Syria would have to be much like the maneuver from Wejh to Aqaba: a movement across tribal areas as though across a magic carpet or stepping-stones or, in Lawrence’s evocative metaphor, by means of a “ladder of tribes.” The rungs of the ladder from Aqaba to Damascus would consist of the Howeitat, Beni Sakhr, Sherarat, Ruwalla, and Serahin, and Lawrence would “climb” the three hundred miles to Azrak, the nearest oasis to Hauran and the Jebel Druze. The nature of the operations would be like “naval war, in mobility, ubiquity, independence of bases and communications, ignoring of ground features, of strategic areas, of fixed directions, of fixed points.” Lawrence would “command the desert. Camel raiding parties, self-contained like ships, might cruise confidently along the enemy’s cultivation-frontier, sure of an unhindered retreat into their desert-element which the Turks could not explore.”3
The operational design that Lawrence had worked out in theory during his epiphany at Wadi Ais in March had already been tested in practice during the Aqaba campaign. Now it would be duly refined. The camel and the desert rider’s frugality would be their firepower. They could operate independently for six weeks with a forty-five-pound bag of flour and a pint of water. Deficits would be made up at the wells, which were rarely a hundred miles apart. The six-week reserve of food gave the raiders an operating range of nearly two thousand miles, a thousand out and a thousand back—a ride from Kansas City, Missouri, to Savannah, Georgia, and back. A ride of fifteen hundred miles could easily be made in a month. Starvation was seldom a factor, for each man rode two hundred pounds of grade-A meat. Any rider rendered camel-less would simply piggyback with a comrade.
On the face of it, Lawrence’s desert force was a primitive army—except in one key department: light machine guns. His men carried Lewis and Hotchkiss guns that outclassed anything the Turks had. The men were clueless as to their mechanics but were made expert in their operation. If they jammed, broke a firing pin, or overheated, they were simply tossed aside. Nothing was allowed to slow the tempo of tactical action and the “eighteen miles an hour” fight. In maneuver warfare, Lawrence believed, “one long-range gun outweighed ninety-nine short.” Along with the heavy use of machine guns, Lawrence developed a highly crafted skill in the employment of explosives. By war’s end, he and his men could destroy any length of track, any segment of bridge, with precision, efficiency, and care.
The organization of his raiding parties evolved rapidly based on the Aqaba experience. Because of long-standing feuds and jealousies, it became virtually impossible to integrate or amalgamate the various tribes; nor could one antithetic tribe operate in the territory of another. To overcome this organizational constraint, Lawrence operated in the greatest dispersion possible, which contributed greatly to his agility, fluidity, and mobility.
Maximum disorganization created maximum articulation: as with a box of LEGOs, Lawrence could create any organization and function as unique as the new task at hand, for each mission was unlike any other and had to be considered afresh. The LEGO-like articulation meant that the enemy response could never develop a classic order of battle, for there was no order, only disorder; his system was unsystematic.
The ordinary rank and file—if that is the proper term for the massively articulated character of the Arab army—were bound together by the common ideal of the revolt. They were all volunteers; some may have hoped for wealth, but this idea distracted their tribal leaders more than the private soldier, who was always at liberty to leave the ranks “without penalty whenever the conviction failed him: the only contract was honor.” The conventional army was held together by a common denominator of discipline, which ensured control. In Lawrence’s LEGO army, control was less important than the diversity of quality and the redundancy of action. There were no common denominators here because nothing was common about the nature of insurgent warfare; and where one man failed to act, one of his mates would rise to stand in his stead. The conventional force was always willing to reduce risk through control: “By this substitution of a sure job for a possible masterpiece, military science made a deliberate sacrifice of a capacity in order to reduce the uncertain element, the bionomic factor, in enlisted humanity. Discipline’s necessary accompaniment was compound or social war—that form in which the fighting man was the product of the multiplied exertions of a long hierarchy, from workshop to supply unit, kept him active in the field.” The diverse quality of a single guerrilla, in Lawrence’s mind, would equal the composite strengt
h of a conventional squad, for every man was a killer, whereas the soldier fought with one hand tied to his logistical rear.
In practice, it was more important that the guerrilla threaten his foe at all times than engage him actively in a fight, for the threat of the raiding specter continually haunted the regular soldier, draining from him initiative, courage, and hope. The success at Aqaba had demonstrated one thing for all to judge: “Irregular war was far more intellectual than a bayonet charge, far more exhausting than service in the comfortable imitative obedience of an ordered army. Guerillas must be allowed liberal work room: in irregular war, of two men together, one was being wasted. Our ideal should be to make our battle a series of single combats, our ranks a happy alliance of agile commanders-in-chief.”4
DURING THE REST of July and into August, Lawrence continued to refine his theory of guerrilla warfare that he had first spun back in March. Lawrence’s theoretical reveries were finally disturbed on August 23, when Feisal arrived with four hundred Arabs and a small force of Egyptians. Admiral Wemyss was sailing about in his flagship HMS Eurylaus, protecting the small harbor as it began to stretch and grow to accommodate its new role as base of operations for the revolt. A new pier was built while Lawrence waited for the arrival of the promised armored cars and aircraft.
Meanwhile, the Turks began preparation for a counterattack from Maan with six thousand men and sixteen artillery pieces. Later in September, a cavalry regiment was sent from the Palestine front to reinforce the push on Aqaba. The Turks began by sending forth a detachment of two thousand infantry to Aba el Lissan, several miles short of Aqaba to the southwest. To counter this move, Lawrence began to worry the eastern flank of the Turks with a series of small raids. Simultaneously, air strikes were sent from El Arish in Palestine. The Turks were further troubled by the constant pinprick attacks to their railway. Lawrence took charge of the rail demolitions himself, making the operation part of a training exercise for his Arabs. He brought along an Englishman nicknamed “Stokes,” who instructed the men on the employment of the Stokes mortar, and an Australian labeled “Lewis,” who trained the raiders on the Lewis machine gun.
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